In the June 2016 edition of Conductor 30|30 (which is 30 minutes on the last 30 days in search, social, and content), I get into a lot. Read our recap below that includes:

Google Beta-Testing A Real-Time Indexing API

Voice Search Reporting is Coming To Google Search Console

Bing News Launches “PubHub”

Are You Using Angular Javascript And Having Trouble With Performance?

Mobile Page Speed Becoming A Ranking Factor For Mobile Sites In The Near Future

Rich Snippets & Schema Update Immediately After Crawling & Indexing

Google Doesn’t Care About Hyphen Vs Underscores (But, Of Course, Has a Preference)

We only touch the surface of what’s happening in SEO, content, and social this month! Watch the full webinar recording for June’s edition.

The Future of Google is Coming: A Real-Time Indexing API

The future is here! At Google I/O, Google announced that they are beta-testing a real-time indexing API so that they can find content faster. Since Panda was assimilated into the main algorithm a few months ago and Penguin 4 will be moving into real-time, it’s clear that Google’s goal is to eventually make every part of their search engine real-time.

Richard Gingras from Google said: “The purpose is to give trusted publishers a way to send Google their content immediately, without having any delay in discovering that content. Google can then surface that content to searchers immediately, in real time, without any delay.”

In my opinion, this will take the place of XML sitemaps and give users more accurate data around their indexation.

Voice Search Reporting is Coming to Google Search Console

Voice search reporting is another new feature that will come to GSC and likely the search analytics report. Since voice search is becoming more and more prevalent (5%-20% of all searches in the past year have been voice search), it makes sense for marketers to be able to track and get data on what is being said to Cortana, Siri, etc. – not just for keyboard search.

According to Google, “voice queries are more long-form; they’re more like sentences and real questions.” These searches sounds more like end-of-the-funnel type keywords, which means: most likely they have a very high monetization potential, and would be smart to optimize for.

Bing News Launches “PubHub”

Bing has launched a new portal for publishers where you can submit your site for inclusion in Bing News. For publishers, this may be worth looking into because not only does Bing own 30% of the U.S. search engine market, but also has the eyes of:

Windows 10 users through Cortana

In front of Outlook users through Outlook News Connector, in the Bing mobile apps on iOS and Android

Bing search app

In order to have your content considered, you’ll need to be reporting on newsworthy events – not just simple recipes. Additionally, they have rules on “newsworthiness,” originality, authority, and readability – if you have those covered, you’re good to submit to the portal. Get more details here.

Using Angular JavaScript May Cause You Problems with Performance

In the majority of my tests, Angular Javascript proved to be an issue for Google and other search engines to properly crawl when it was tasked with serving content. A lot of the time, cached pages were coming up blank or there was a duplication issue with the clean URL and hash-bang URL (#!).

So why can’t Google read this? Google can read JavaScript. But when we ran different crawlers through the site, we found that if a static version of the page had 800 words, only 300 words were actually being seen – and only in the header and footer. This is a huge problem for SEO if crawlers can’t see 100% of the content.

Mobile Page Speed Becoming A Ranking Factor

Actually, a lot of people thought Google was already doing this but it’s not true. This is new. Google doesn’t separate out many desktop signals for mobile rankings.

Gary Illyes from Google said they are in the “planning stages” and it is months away from being rolled out.

@jenstar as I said, we’re still in the planning phase so I can’t give you a concrete answer. Aim for the highest @eYordanov

When he says “aim for the highest,” he means the highest page speed possible. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and aim for green. If you have an image-heavy site, shrink and compress your images to give your PageSpeed a good jump.

Rich Snippets and Schema Update Immediately After Crawling & Indexing

If you’ve ever Googled something and you see prices or reviews coming up, that’s Schema.

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According to Google, if you have Schema tagging on your page, they will crawl this for you immediately. Everyone should be using some sort of Schema because Google has hinted that it will play a role in rankings (I believe it already does).

Google Doesn’t Care About Hyphen Vs. Underscores

Do you use hyphens or underscores in your URLS? Hyphens has always been known to be an SEO (and U/X) best practice to separate words in URLs.

Recently, John Mueller from Google said they don’t care between the two but prefer hyphens. So don’t go crazy if you have old pages that use underscores. Let’s not forget that back in 2007, Matt Cutts said to use hyphens and that advice has not seemed to change.

Patrick is the Sr. Director of Digital Strategies at Conductor, Inc. He is a passionate digital marketing professional with over 11 years experience in the SEO space. For over a decade, he has had the opportunity to help clients grow their organic footprint and overall digital experience.